Reading Unix Use and Security From The Ground Up by The Prophet back in 1989 familiarized me with how to use Unix (anyone remember uucico?), launching my career into IT, initially as a Unix systems administrator (anyone remember when corporate IT racked their own servers?)
textfiles.com
41–50 of 196 posts
Re: textfiles.com
#42Has the community of people who wrote documents like this just dried up and vanished? Or have they all moved somewhere underground I can't find?
You should poke around in gopher. Has a very dial-up BBS feel, complete with FIGlets. Here is a nice web proxy: https://gopher.commons.host/
In the 1980s we had fantastic Internet connectivity and bandwidth at SAIC but most stuff was on FTP sites. I spent at least an hour a week curating lists of FTP sites and directory listings of them. I was sort-of a human search engine and would help people find useful stuff. Then the text-based www happened, then Mozilla happened, and things exponentially got more awesome. We had a smart young guy, Greg Hannah, who set up web servers for us on just about day zero of the web.
Re: textfiles.com
#43Shouldn't have stolen the color scheme from jwz. Now we have two problems.
I used that color scheme before the internet was a thing!
Re: textfiles.com
#44I learnt about coffee and how to brew it from the ancient coffeefaq.txt file, copied via sneakernet and usenet, back in the early 90s. The text is totally valuable, and of course still valid. It has found its permanent home on text files.com, and that is so great.
Re: textfiles.com
#45Has the community of people who wrote documents like this just dried up and vanished? Or have they all moved somewhere underground I can't find?
DejaNews (bought by Google and reskinned as Google Groups) showed up in the 90s and made everyone realize that everything we wrote would be searchable forever. Trumpet Winsock scripts made it possible to offer Internet access and BBSes faded out. Gopher was powered by indexed textfiles, but hosting on the Internet was very traceable back then, and often at a university where tolerances for anarchism were low. Geocities picked up the “post text files” banner for a while but eventually collapsed as blogs and web forums took up the writing output of most.
Re: textfiles.com
#46Has the community of people who wrote documents like this just dried up and vanished? Or have they all moved somewhere underground I can't find?
The one's from 80's and 90's just grew up and dot-com era really gave more opportunities for the creative programmers. Younger people will never write on many of the topics in these files because it will land you in jail FAST. It used to be more anonymity back then. Phreaking, warez scenes were alive and well. Heck, even demoscence is not the same anymore. Anyways if you are into coding/hacking, working for a startup…
There was also a lot of motivation to phreak and trade warez due to a lack of things we'd simply take for granted nowadays, such as always-on connectivity and a widespread free-software and free-culture scene.
It's a lot harder to explain the whole "anarchy" obsession that shows up in the files, though. Maybe that kind of loser attitude would make you "cool" and "a tough guy" back in the 1980s and the 1990s. Or at least that's what the file authors thought.
Re: textfiles.com
#47Hmmm, why doesn't the site have https?
This is the late 90s and https still takes too much CPU to justify for most purposes.
Re: textfiles.com
#48Hmmm, why doesn't the site have https?
Not every browser supports current https
Re: textfiles.com
#49Re: textfiles.com
#50Has the community of people who wrote documents like this just dried up and vanished? Or have they all moved somewhere underground I can't find?
We're right here. :)